Islamabad: Pakistan Supreme Court on Thursday ruled against life-long disqualification of a person from holding public office, in relief to former prime minister and Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz supremo Nawaz Sharif.
Sharif on Thursday led his party's election campaign in the country's most populous Punjab province, urging the people to vote for him so that he could "re-build Pakistan".
The general elections are scheduled to be held on February 8. Jailed former premier Imran Khan's Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party is already out of the polls as the Supreme Court deprived it of its election symbol cricket 'bat'. Now, PTI candidates are contesting the elections independently. Nawaz led the election campaign of the PML-N on Thursday, five days after the PTI was officially ousted from the political arena. This is also his first public appearance after three months. In October last year, Nawaz returned to Pakistan from the UK where he spent four years in self-exile.
Speaking at a public rally in Hafizabad, about 200 km from provincial capital Lahore, 74-year-old Nawaz asked the people to help him rebuild Pakistan. "My mission is to make Pakistan stand on its feet. If I had not been ousted by five judges of the apex court in 2017, the people of Pakistan would have been prosperous today. There would have been no inflation in the country and the dollar would be around Rs 100," he said.
He said that if every time (1993, 1999 and 2017) he had not been ousted from power, Pakistan would have attained a better position in the world and become an Asian Tiger by now. Nawaz, who led the country's most powerful political family and the ruling PML-N party for more than three decades, suffered a heavy blow to his career when a Supreme Court ruling in the Panamagate case ousted him from power in July 2017.
Known as the 'Lion of Punjab', Nawaz became the Prime Minister in the politically unstable Pakistan for a record three times, but every-time he was forced to quit in the middle of his term. He talked about his previous governments' achievements on the economic front and urged people to vote for him to change their lives.
The PTI has alleged that Nawaz is the powerful military establishment's new favourite and is set to become the prime minister for the fourth time with its blessings. PML-N president Shehbaz Sharif, however, defended his elder brother saying, "There is no truth in suggestions that Nawaz Sharif is using the shoulders of the military establishment to become the premier.
